Ken Cain Joins Channel Marketing Group

Ken Cain, recently retired Vice President of Marketing for Capital Electric Supply (a Sonepar company) for the past sixteen years and previously Vice President of Marketing for Rexel and Vice President of Marketing for Branch Electric before it was purchased by Rexel in 2000, has joined Channel Marketing Group’s Executive-in-Residence program.

Cain, a forty-one year marketing veteran, has extensive expertise in the development of manufacturer funding programs to support distributor marketing efforts.  In fact, he used to present on the topic at NAED Adventure Marketing Conference when he was with Branch Electric.

Throughout his career he has developed joint initiatives focused on identifying objectives and building infrastructure to execute dissemination of information through various vehicles ranging from social media, promotions, public relations, imprint collateral.  Ken has a unique criteria and procedures to quantifiably track the achievement of set marketing objectives. His disciplined approach provides for goal setting and accountability for all participants, delivering results where all parties objectives are meant. He firmly believes that in any business scenarios, the value proposition must apply to and meet the expectations of all participants.

Channel Marketing Group’s Executive-in-Residence program is a unique initiative where recently retired industry veterans can share their expertise and relationships to Channel Marketing Group clients. This enables CMG to bring additional resources to support clients. They partner with CMG to develop ideas that generate results.

In considering some of the areas where Ken can add value to distributors, manufacturers and manufacturer representatives, Ken shared:

Distributors

• Develop / enhance programs to support existing efforts to increase sales through effective marketing including the use of vendor supported funding to achieve enhanced customer participation. 
• Develop / enhance customer training as a differentiator to drive market share and the ability for existing customers to expand their business capabilities. While enabling “training” to be a profit center.
• Experience with developing and managing meetings, events and incentive programs with participation size ranging from 4 to 3200 participants with budgets up to $2.2M. 

Manufacturers

• Share the distributor perspective of co-op, MDF and more to help the manufacturer develop a more effective strategy.
• Identifying the ROI for funding.
• Provide best practices to improve distributor and end-user training programs.  

Reps

• The tools Ken used as a distributor to develop jointly funded marketing initiatives can be deployed by manufacturer representatives to support their marketing efforts.
• Help agencies optimize the effectiveness of the marketing programs and promotions that they, of their factory, develop for distributors. Most Co-op funds are wasted, and most promotional programs are ineffective. That does not need to be the case. Ken can share how he made these efforts a win-win with reps who called on him.
• Best practices for improving the effectiveness of training programs and relationship-building events to optimize the benefits to all parties.

Welcome to the team Ken.

Want to connect with Ken, click here to connect on LinkedIn or here to email him.